Saturday, December 13, 2014

BBC features Jews of Arabia

Update: the phrase 'Bahrain Jews wield significant power' has raised a few eyebrows. Is it antisemitic?

In factthe Bahraini Jews do wield power, although how significant is a matter of debate.

Besides the former Bahraini
ambassador to the US, businesswoman Houda Nonoo, Nancy
Khedouri sits in the upper house of the Bahrain parliament and is
deputy chairwoman of the foreign affairs, defence and national security
committee. Ebrahim Daoud Nonoo, another former member of parliament, is
now a leading Bahraini businessman. He’s working with Minister of
Culture Shaikha Mai Bint Mohammad Al Khalifa to renovate the Manama
synagogue.

****************After years of institutional silence, the BBC's new-found interest in the Jews of the Middle East is to be welcomed*. In fact, this story originated on the British Library website some six months ago. The article almost admits that persecution 'after the creation of Israel' was a key factor in the Jewish exodus from the Gulf, but then gives evidence that the communities of Iran and Bahrain suffered 'racist attacks' well beforehand. (With thanks to all those who emailed me).

The Jews may have
originated in the Middle East but they were long ago scattered far and
wide - to the Gulf, among other places. Few now remain, except in Iran.
But a century ago, writes Matthew Teller, there was even a proposal to
found a Jewish state at an oasis near Bahrain.

In 1859 Griffith Jenkins, a senior British naval officer in the Gulf, wrote to a subordinate named Hiskal.

Hiskal - or Yehezkel - ben Yosef was a minor official
representing British interests in Muscat. And, like his predecessor in
the post in the 1840s (a man named Reuben), he was Jewish.

Jews had been living in Muscat since at least 1625. In 1673,
according to one traveller, a synagogue was being built, implying
permanence. British officer James Wellsted also noted the existence of a
Jewish community on a visit in the 1830s.

Jenkins's letter talks obliquely about the Imam (a Muslim
ruler who held sway in Oman's interior) and the arrival of a man from
Persia. He ends by asking Hiskal to explain the matter in private - and
then, remarkably, had his letter translated into Hebrew.

British Library curator Daniel Lowe, who unearthed the letter
recently, is flummoxed. With Arabic in daily use, and Hiskal doubtless
able to read English, why would Jenkins communicate in Hebrew?

Lowe guesses that he may have been using Hebrew as a secret
code, to be understood by Hiskal but not by messengers - and, perhaps
crucially, not by the Imam and the "man from Persia".

But if this remains a mystery, it's well-known that Jews once lived all across Arabia.

The Koran records Jewish tribes in and around Medina in the
7th Century, and the medieval traveller Benjamin of Tudela, who passed
through in about 1170, describes sizeable Jewish populations throughout
modern-day Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, as well as on both shores of the
Gulf - at Kish (Iran) and Qatif (Saudi Arabia).

Baghdad had been home to Jews since the 6th Century BC.
Around the time of WW1, officials estimated the city's Jews to number
between 55,000 and 80,000, in a total population of 200,000 - a
proportion equal to or greater than that in centres of European Jewry
such as Warsaw or Berlin.
Today, fewer than 10 individuals remain.

For a combination of reasons including economic migration,
political pressure and outright persecution - notably after the State of
Israel was declared in 1948 - almost all the Jewish communities of the
Gulf countries dwindled to nothing in the 20th Century.

Two survive. In Iran perhaps 25,000 Jews remain, while
Bahrain has a tiny Jewish minority, comprising only a few families -
though they wield significant power. Until last year, Bahrain's
ambassador to the US was a Jewish woman, Houda Nonoo.

Neither community, though, has had an easy time. Racist attacks were being recorded by the British in Iran in 1905 and in Bahrain in 1929.
Meanwhile, British diplomat John Gordon Lorimer hints at tensions caused by Jewish businessmen in Kuwait, who distilled "spirituous liquors" and thus enabled local Muslims to break religious laws.

In 1917 an outlandish plan was floated to use Bahrain as the bridgehead from which to establish a "Jewish State of Eastern Arabia"
in the desert nearby, but it came to nothing. Just weeks afterwards
British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour gave his support to the idea of
establishing a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine.

*The following addition to the BBC timeline on Israel (with thanks: Ian) has been noted: 1949-1950s - About a million Jewish refugees from Arab countries, plus 250,000 Holocaust survivors, settle in Israel. (In fact the true figure was 650, 000 but we are not complaining - ed)

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)